Judging George: A Mid-Term Assessment

by Fred Greenstein

Mr. Greenstein is a professor of politics at Princeton.

In his last book, The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton, Mr. Greenstein provided certain criteria by which presidents should be judged. He ended with Bill Clinton. At a conference at Princeton in April, Mr. Greenstein extended his analysis to George W. Bush. Mr. Greenstein's conclusions appear below. The professor's full lecture can be accessed by clicking here.

Emotional Intelligence. A reasonably high level of emotional intelligence
is  or
ought to be -- a requirement for the custodian of the most potentially lethal
arsenal in human
experience. To be emotionally intelligent a chief executive need not be a paragon
of mental
health. It is only necessary that his (and someday her) public actions not be
distorted by
uncontrolled emotions. By the litmus of emotional intelligence, the young George
W. Bush
was unqualified for the presidency, because his drinking had a disruptive effect
on his
everyday life.*

It would not be surprising if someone who abused alcohol until the age of 40
and then
abruptly went on the wagon proved to be an emotional tinder box. That appears
not to be the
case of Bush. After he stopped drinking, his business and political careers
were free of
emotional excesses. He bore up well in the prolonged campaign that brought him
to the White
House, rebounded after his defeat in the New Hampshire primary, and weathered
the post-
Election Day stalemate with seeming equanimity. He also was measured and patient
while his
associates negotiated the release of the reconnaissance plane crew detained
by China in the
first national security crisis of his presidency.

More important, of course, is his comportment in his administrations
wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Whatever the merits of those actions, they do not appear
to have been
driven by out-of-control emotions on the part of the commander in chief. On
this score it is
instructive to consider a lengthy interview that Bush granted to NBC Nightly
News anchor
Tom Brokaw at the conclusion of the major military action in Iraq. It revealed
a president who
was serious, thoughtful, and neither defensive nor boastfulness. It was very
much the manner
of a man at peace with himself.

Bushs demeanor was strikingly different from that of the emotionally
challenged
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in similar circumstances. Johnson became obsessed
by the
war in Vietnam, absorbing himself in its details, interrupting his sleep to
check on military
developments, and experiencing recurrent nightmares. Nixon presided over the
removal of
American combat forces from Southeast Asia, but was needlessly confrontational
in doing so.
In April 1970, Nixon decided to strengthen South Vietnamese by attacking a communist
sanctuary in Cambodia. Rejecting advice that the incursion be reported as a
mater of military
routine, he chose to announce it himself on nationwide television, triggering
an explosion of
protest that complicated his effort to extricate American forces from Vietnam.

Cognitive Style. Late-night television humor not withstanding, George
W. Bush does
not lack native intelligence. For much of his life, however, he has not been
marked by
intellectual curiosity or drawn to the play of ideas. Moreover, as the nations
first MBA chief
executive, he favors a corporate leadership model in which he relies on his
subordinates to
structure his options. As we have seen, he was often remote from specifics as
governor of
Texas and seemed ill-informed in the early months of his presidency.

After September 11, however, there was a quantum leap in Bushs mastery
of policy
specifics. The impression that there had been a sharp increase in his mastery
of the issues of
the day was confirmed by the legwork of Knight Ridder White House correspondent
Steven
Thomma, who interviewed members of Congress who are in regular contact with
Bush. As one
of them put it, Hes as smart as he wants to be."

Political Skill. The congenitally gregarious George W. Bush resembles
his fellow
Texan Lyndon Johnson in his aptitude for personal politics and his readiness
to seek support on
both sides of the aisle. In the aftermath of September 11, Bush employed the
same face-to-face
political skills that marked his governorship and the earlier months of his
presidency,
reinforcing his bonds with members of the policy-making community, including
key
Democrats. In this he was helped by the experienced professionals in his administration.
Bush and his associates were far sure-footed the lead-up to intervention in
Iraq than
they had been in the aftermath of September 11. They relied on shifting arguments
and failed
to a persuasive case for the necessity of immediate military action against
Iraq. There was a
lack of suppleness to their efforts to get support for a second Security Council
resolution and
an abruptness to the communications of some of Bushs associates that played
poorly outside
of the United States.

Effectiveness as a Public Communicator. Public communication is the
realm in
which Bushs political style has been most conspicuously transformed during
his time in
office. In a manner reminiscent of the early Harry S. Truman, he began his presidency
with a
less-than-fluent approach to public communication. After September 11, he made
a series of
public addresses and unscripted statements that were powerful and effective.
As time went on,
however, his formal presentations sometimes lapsed into the singsong mode of
delivery that
marked his inaugural address. It remained evident, however, that he can give
an effective
address when he invests the effort to do so. That was very much the case of
his address to the
United Nations in September 2002. However, he was strangely remote in the early
period of
the war in Iraq, and he compared unfavorably with British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, when
the two men appeared at a press availability on March 27, 2003.
Whereas Blair was detailed
and analytic in his answers, Bush was laconic and informative, confining himself
to such
statements as the war would last however long it takes to achieve our
objective.

Organizational Capacity. Team leadership is one of Bushs strengths.
He has chosen
strong associates; he is a natural when it comes to rallying subordinates, and
he tolerates and
encourages diversity of advice. Because avoiding public disagreement is a watchword
of the
Bush presidency, the precise dynamics of his deliberative processes are not
well documented,
but. Bob Woodwards Bush at War suggests two respects in which they
may be less than ideal.
One is that Bushs practices seem to lend themselves to bureaucratic maneuvering.
In August
2002, for example, when Colin Powell wanted to stress the importance of addressing
the
problem of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq through the UN, he arranged for
a private
meeting with Bush and national security advisor Rice.

A second is that they may shield Bush from potentially valuable give and take,
since debate in meetings Bush did not attend (the so-
called principals meetings) was sometimes sharper than in meetings at
which he was present.
These are practices that would have been anathema to the modern president who
was
most gifted at organizational leadership, former supreme commander Dwight Eisenhower.
I
know of only one way in which you can be sure you have done your best to make
a wise
decision, Eisenhower once remarked. That is to get all of the responsible
policy makers with
their different viewpoints in front of you, and listen to them debate. I do
not believe in bringing
them in one at a time, and than the therefore being more impressed by the most
recent one you
hear earlier ones.**

Policy Vision. I reserve policy vision for last because considering
it permits an
instructive comparison between George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush. The senior
Bush was
famously indifferent to the vision thing. The younger Bush has faulted
his father for failing
to enunciate clear goals for his presidency and not building on the momentum
of victory in the
Gulf War in 1991 to rack up domestic accomplishments on which to campaign for
re-election.
George W. Bush does have the vision thing, not because he is an
aficionado of policy in and
of itself as Bill Clinton was. Rather, he holds that if a leader does not set
his own goals, others
will define them for him. Having seen his father fail to amass a record on which
to win
reelection, his practice is to campaign and govern on the basis explicit objectives.
Therein lies a potential irony. Bush 41 may have failed to win re-election in
1992
because he lacked vision. If the aftermath of war in Iraq or Bushs quest
for a supply-side
remedy for a halting economy go wrong, Bush 43 may be undone because of his
policy vision.

*Emotional intelligence is more a term of art than science. It
was popularized by the science
writer Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 1995),
and it provides a
convenient catchall for summarizing the many specific ways in which emotional
flaws can
impede the performance of ones responsibilities.

**Dwight D. Eisenhower, Columbia University Oral History Interview, July 20,
1967,
uncorrected transcript. The last sentence of the quotation was unaccountably
omitted in the
corrected final transcript. The classical discussion of the importance of rigorous
debate in
presidential advisor systems is Alexander L. George, The Case for Multiple
Advocacy in
Making Foreign Policy, American Political Science Review 66 (1972),
751-85.